If I’m not crying, what am I feeling?

I didn’t cry when I left my abuser, and that doesn’t make me broken

When I left him, I thought I’d fall apart. After twelve years of coercive control, twelve years of walking on eggshells, managing his moods, silencing my own intuition, I expected a kind of collapse. Tears. Grief. The emotional reckoning I’d seen described by so many other women. But it didn’t come. I didn’t cry when I left. Not the day I packed my things. Not the week after. Not once since. What I felt wasn’t sadness. It was clarity. It was rage. It was that specific kind of cold fire that comes when something inside you snaps into focus and says, “We’re done here.”

And for the longest time, I wondered if that meant I was broken. Because in every support group I’d quietly followed, I saw the same themes: women missing their abuser. Women crying themselves to sleep. Women still hoping for change, still checking his social media, still aching with confusion and longing. I didn’t feel any of that. I didn’t miss him. I didn’t want to know who he was with. I didn’t spiral over what could’ve been. I just… left. And I didn’t look back. I thought that made me cold. Damaged. Maybe even heartless.

But I’ve come to understand something very different: Not everyone grieves the person. Sometimes, we grieve what was taken.

Some of us don’t mourn the man. We mourn the years. The version of ourselves we had to lose in order to survive. The energy it took to keep the peace. The dreams we shelved. The clarity that came too late. For some of us, leaving isn’t followed by heartbreak, it’s followed by honesty. And what we feel isn’t sadness. It’s the first breath of air outside a sealed room.

It’s not that I didn’t care. It’s that I’d spent too long caring. Too long protecting someone who would’ve watched me burn. Too long trying to translate cruelty into something I could live with. By the time I left, I had nothing left to cry about. I had grieved my way out while I was still in it. And maybe that’s you, too. Maybe you left and didn’t unravel. Maybe you felt steady, or angry, or eerily calm. Maybe you’re not in pieces, but you’re still quietly wondering: Why don’t I feel the way everyone says I should?

If that’s you, let me say this as clearly as I can:

You are not broken. You are unbound.

Not everyone’s trauma spills out in tears. Sometimes it rises as fire. Sometimes it shows up as silence, or peace, or a fierce knowing that you will never again tolerate less than safety. None of that means you’re cold. None of it means it wasn’t “that bad.” None of it means you’re doing it wrong. It just means you’re healing in your own way. And if you want to sit with your feelings, but don’t quite know where to start, I’ve created a free journal prompt you can download:

👉 If I’m Not Crying, What Am I Feeling?

It’s a quiet, printable reflection you can work through at your own pace. No pressure. No performance. Just space to be honest with yourself about what’s really going on beneath the surface. This is part of a project I’ve recently started called Control Alt Escape, a digital safety resource for women leaving abuse. I’m building it slowly, with love, to help women navigate online privacy, secure their devices, and take their power back, one step at a time.

Leaving is not the end of the story. It’s the beginning of something quieter. Something steadier. Something that belongs only to you. No, I didn’t cry when I left. But every day I protect my peace, I heal a little more.

And I promise, rage can be just as sacred as tears.